Microsoft Targets Google Health Developers

Today Microsoft announced that users of Google Health, scheduled to be shut down on Jan. 1, 2012, can send their data to Microsoft’s competing HealthVault service. In the closing paragraph, Microsoft also pitches developers to migrate their Google Health projects to HealthVault.

Google says it’s shutting down the projects because they got very little traction but health industry tech innovators say that Google Health may have been ahead of its time, did a poor job reaching out to a now growing ecosystem of developers and ought to be put on slow life support or open sourced instead of being shut down. When it comes to patient-centric cloud-based electronic health records, the opportunity remains large, the need severe but the challenges are substantial.

Will Microsoft be able to do a better job of building an ecosystem and reaching out to partners? While Google Health never had a business model, HaulthVault can be seen as the customer-section of Microsoft Amalga, an enterprise health intelligence platform.

Other services are also attempting to provide an alternative to Google Health by offering more practical, interconnected applications and APIs – notably the RunKeeper Health Graph API, which we covered here.

Meanwhile, Bing’s translate APIs, which have commercial support from Microsoft, have emerged as an alternative to Google’s translation APIs, which are set to be shut down. This was one of the things that led me to speculate that Microsoft’s future may be in data as a service.